A study of 50 incarcerated urban prostitutes finds that 40% have been under the control of a pimp. Pimp-controlled prostitutes are more likely to be single, to have failed to complete high school, to be non-White, to have never held a legitimate job, and to come from exceptionally dysfunctional families. Pimp-controlled prostitutes were younger when they had their first sexual experience, first used illegal drugs, and first engaged in prostitution. Pimp-controlled prostitutes are also more likely to be the victims of violence from customers, suggesting that the pressure to make extra money to support the pimp exposes these women to additional risk. Because of these accumulated adverse experiences, this group may require additional, long-term interventions.

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Drawing upon research with criminalized women in Massachusetts, this article examines barriers to health care before, during, and after incarceration. Although very few of the surveyed women reported having had to forgo medical treatment because of an inability to pay, almost all of them reported being unable to access consistent, ongoing health care services. Typically, the women recalled sequential contact with dozens of providers at dozens of facilities, treatment plans that had been developed but never executed, psychotherapy that opened wounds but was terminated before healing them, and involuntary interruptions in legally prescribed courses of psychiatric medications. Acknowledging that these problems are related to wider structures of health care delivery in the United States, this article ends with a modest proposal for developing a role for health care advocates assigned to coordinate care for those with complicated medical problems to help them manage their health care needs over a long period of time.

Thirty-three women recently released from a Massachusetts correctional facility were included in a qualitative study, carried out between January and July 2007, in which semi-structured, open-ended, individual interviews were conducted. The women described lives repeatedly disrupted, typically by sexual and physical violence, and then again by homelessness, joblessness, bad relationships, loss of their children, legal troubles, fractured physical and mental health, and fragmented medical attention by a large, disjointed variety of providers and facilities. This article argues that rather than repairing life disruptions, the women's fragmented health care histories tended to echo or even become part of that fragmentation. We suggest that criminalization and medicalization actually served as two sides of the same coin in the women's life experiences.

Drawing on 3 years of fieldwork with a community of criminalized women in eastern Massachusetts, this article explores their ambivalent, often negative, relationship with and feelings about Alcoholics Anonymous/Narcotics Anonymous (AA/NA). We suggest that coerced participation in AA/NA undermines any potential value that these programs may have for other types of participants and that the Twelve Step ideology of personal responsibility and turning oneself over to a Higher Power fails to resonate for women who are homeless, poor, incarcerated, abused, and have had their children taken from them.

Numerous researchers have documented the gendered impact of the United States' domestic war against drugs. Women incarcerated for non-violent drug offenses are the fastest growing segment of America's prison population because of the harsh penalties for using, selling and transporting illegal substances. The impact of U.S. drug policy on women in other countries, in contrast, has been overlooked. This paper argues that the greatly increased imprisonment of women in Ecuador for drug-related offenses is collateral damage of the U.S. war on drugs. The impact of the expansion of women's imprisonment in Ecuador appears to be particularly damaging to the inmate's children who frequently join their mother in prison. U.S. policy should not be exported to other countries before having a clear picture of the unintended negative consequences.

Using a mixed-method approach of interviews and ethnographic observations, the authors followed a cohort of women postincarceration in Massachusetts for a period of 9 years. The women repeatedly cycled through health care and other institutions, yet very few moved into stable housing, jobs, and family situations. Nearly all continue to suffer multiple physical and mental health challenges despite high levels of access to health care. This article is intended to provide those who work in correctional institutions a broader view of the lives of justice-involved women outside of those institutions. In light of the short sentences and frequent breaks in continuity of care experienced by these women, the authors call for expansion of the roles of community health center providers inside jails and prisons.

This article explores the notion of gender overdetermination in relation to a community of criminalised women in Massachusetts. Reexamining classic writings on overdetermination by Louis Althusser, Sigmund Freud, Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre, we query the notion of gender overdetermination and posit it as an effective lens for thinking about the persistence of gender as a social construct. The combination of the structural processes of overdetermination with the discursive and ideological power of overdetermination complicates and reduces possibilities and effectiveness of sustained acts of resistance. The criminalised women of our study permanently inhabit a space in which aetiology, practice, discipline and interpretation are all hyper-gendered, meaning that acts of resistance are construed as more evidence of inescapable and essential gender identity.